I
B6 / FRAN CESGO PASSANTI
As a conceptual model, this notion of the vernacular was important, be
cause it could open architecture to a redefinition. Unlike classicism, which
was a closed formal system internal to architecture, the vernacular model in
sisted ou connecting architecture to something external to it, the identity of
a society; and it further insisted that such a connection be not invented but
found. Thus, the vernacular model helped to open architecture to such
“facts” as ships and industrial products. On the one hand, this iucreased
openness represented a difficult challenge for architecture, because it weak
ened its autonomy as a discipline and hence its continuity and accountabil
ity: with architecture no longer a closed system, it became more difficult to
refine and codifr routine design strategies (such as eighteenth-century
apartment planning in France) that could provide standards for teaching
and judgment. On the other hand, like all disciplines, architecture has al
ways been open to ideas from other disciplines or cultures (think of the Ital
ian influence on France during the sixteenth century). and this openness
had been growing exponentially since the eighteenth century because of
travel and changes in technology, economy, and society. In the face of this
accelerated change, the vernacular model provided a way to master the
process: as we have seen in the case of Le Corbusier, it provided a concep
tual structure for integrating the new inputs into the discipline of architec
rure and for broadening its vocabulary and responsibilities.53
CHAPTER SIX
The Vernacular, Memory, and Architecture
STANFORD ANDERSON
The term “vernacular architecture” is often used to refer to buildings, or
rather, extended physical environments that are distant in rime or space—
places unfamiliar to modern societies. Distance allows these environments
to be invested with idealized social commitments. This unification of ideal
ized space and society can then be employed in a critique of modern soci
eties.’ A perceived close relationship of place and society is intrinsic to the
notion of “the vernacular;’ but it is not necessary that this relationship be
romanticized. This chapter argues that the vernacular persists in modern so
cieties. Furthermore, even the most noted of modern architects have been
known to draw upon the vernacular in the best of their works. Attention to
the vernacular need not be a matter of nostalgia or of regressive social con
structions. The vernacular need not be the enemy of the modern. Let us be
gin with an example.
Figure 6.i shows houses in the market street of the Dutch town of
Woudrichem. Under modern industrial conditions, even in the hands of
modernists, vernacular traditions of building may be sustained. Most visi
tors to the Netherlands are stmck by the distinctiveness of the typical
houses, and thus by the urban fabric of the old centers of Dutch towns.
Characteristically, these houses are of brick, in rows, with the gable end to
the street; they are relative!;’ small, but the; have large windows directly at
street level, with little if any separation from the street. Collectively, these
houses yield a cityscape of remarkable intimacy and openness. Houses of
this type were built without architects for centuries, certalniy prominently
from the Renaissance until the twentieth centur)s establishing a widely dis
persed Dutch housing vernacular.

F I C. 6. . Houses in market street, Woudrichern. Holland. Photograph
by Stanfrird Anderson.
Thr Veruncular, .Me;;zo;’, andArchiucture /
FIG. 6.2. J. M. Granpré Moliere, Vreewijk, Rotterdarn (1914—33). Photograph
by Stanford Anderson.
In the early twentieth century, as Dutch architects pioneered in social
housing for the emerging modern metropolis, the received type influenced
their work significantly.2 This tradition continued, with increased archi
tectural a.nd urban sophistication in the work of M. J. Granpré Moliere
(r883—r972), as in his famous Vrenvijk community in Rotterdam (fig. 6.2).
Granpré Moliere was the conservative professor at the most important
Dutch school of architecture, the Technical University in Dclii, from 1924
to 1953. In his pedagogy and through the example of his work, such as
Vreewijk, he championed tradition and resisted the then emergent inter
national modern architecuire. Still, one must give him his due. Toda eight
decades after it was built, Vreewijk remains a highly successful, livable
envic-oi-gnent. The casual evidence of what one sees on the window sills, in
the window dressing, and in the backyards of the current residents max’ be
conservative and middle-class, hut it appears in comfortable relation to an
environment that is more valued today than at its inception.
Even architects of a distinctly modernist inclination established housing
types that relied sianificanth- on this tradition, as in the unassertive street ar
ióo /STANFORD ANDERSON
FIG. 6.3. J. J. P. Oud, Kieffloek housing estate, Rotterdam (1925—29). Photo
graph by Stanford Anderson.
chitecture with balconies and generous ground-floor windows by J. W. van
der Weele on the Laan van Meerdervoort in The Hague (3927). Still more
remarkable, much of the housing built in the interwar years by Dutch ar
chitects of such impeccable modernist credentials as J. J. P. Oud retained
distinctive characteristics owing to the strong Dutch vernacular tradition,
represented by his housing in the Kiethoek housing estate, Rotterdam, dat
ing from 1925—29 (fig. 6.3).
In the famous Weiflenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in 1927, a showcase for
advanced modern architecture built under the direction of Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, two leading Dutch architects were represented, Oud and
Mart Stam. It is notable that, even when working within such an experi
mental program and in another country, these Dutch modernists built row
houses, though now with significantly altered organizations of space and
function. It is of note that only the Dutch architects built row houses at the
Weif3enhof. Even this sketchy series of examples of Dutch domestic archi
tecmre reveals a recognizable tie, but also a progressively loosening tie, to a
The Vernacular Memory, and Architecture / 6i
Dutch vernacular tradition of house building. There is a loosening, though
not a complete dissolution, of what I argue is the close relation of social and
disciplinary memory in vernacular architecture —a close relationship,
though not one that need be constructed in romantically idealistic terms. In
this progression we do reach a point where one no longer speaks of vernac
ular architecture, but one still recognizes something indigenous to the
place, an underlying “vernacular usage?’ The question of why the Dutch
modernists performed in this way will be better addressed after some gen
eral considerations and the introduction of other examples.
What is at issue in relating the vernacular, memory, and modernism? In
an earlier essay, I sought to understand what may be a special and close
relationship between vernacular architecture and memory, what might be
called “embodied memory?’3 A still earlier essay that was concerned with
monumental architecture distinguished between “memory through ar
chitecture” and “memory in architecture?’ Put differently, a distinction was
drawn between a “societal memory carried in architecture” as opposed to
“the operation of memory within the discipline of architecture itself?’4 The
former, let us call it social memory in architecture, was illustrated by, among
other works, the medieval European copies of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem (e.g., Santo Stefano in Bologna). Since such “copies” were quite
different from one another, and from the original, it follows that the reli
giously generated recall of this holy site did not entail strict architectural
norms. Social memory dominated architectural form and precedent.
On the other hand, disciftlinary memory was illustrated by projects such as
those of the so-called “Revolutionary architects” of eighteenth-century
France—specifically those of Etienne Boullée. In such projects, recollection
of significant precedents is at the same time more faithful formally and yet
radically innovative in scale, organization, and meaning. Architecture here
approaches an autonomous state. The argument of the earlier paper, how
ever, invited other questions such as the following: Was (or is?) there a con
dition under which social and disciplinary memory are not separated? If so,
under what conditions would social (or collective) memory and disciplinary
memory diverge? In brief my answers were these: first, what is commonly
referred to as vernacular architecture represents at least a close cohesion of
social and disciplinary memory; secondly, it is the advent of writing and his
tory that invites the increasing distinction between these memory systems.
In looking to understand vernacular architecture, a first hypothesis is the
one just stated: in vernacular architecture, social and disciplinary memory
162/ STANFORD ANDERSON The Vemacula Memo;y, and Architecture / 163

are closely related. Yet the diversity of vernacular architecture accords with
varying degrees of that relation of social and disciplinary memory—from a
virtual fusion to a looser but still identifiable relation. Thirdly, these shift
ing degrees of relation, and what eventually may become a weak relation,
accord with the passage from preliterate to literate societies. Finally, this
passage is also a passage from societies dependent on memory alone to
those with historical constructions. That is, in various societies, differences
in the operation of memory accord with distinctions among vernacular
chitectures and between vernacular architecture and architecture that is
more self-consciously conceived.

Vernacular Architecture: The Cohesion ofSocial

and Disciplinaiy Memoiy
Take just one example from innumerable instances around the world, the
Ranni villages in the deserts of Gujarat (fig. 6.4) still preserve a distinctive
building form that can be closely correlated with the social life of the peo
ple who inhabit them. Among the various aspects of this social life is the art
of building itself serving the maintenance of these structures, but also the
construction of new units or compounds. Despite the presence from time
immemorial of this art of building, like other customs in the social life of
the Banni, it is very much a matter of the present. Until recently, and then
from outside the community, there was no record of this building technol
ogy or its use other than in the actual buildings and the craft knowledge of
the builders, passed from generation to generation. One must conceive that
there have been changes in both the social life and the building technology FIG. 6 . +. Chief’s house, Ludia village, Banni, Gujarat, India. Kulbushan Jam,
MudArchitecture ofthe Indian Desert (Ahrnedabad, 1992), fig. Hi. Plan, section,
of the Banni; yet such processes are necessarily lost in time. Innovation may
and elevation by Kulbushan Jam.
continue to occur, but this too is experienced as a response to current con
ditions and then lost in the continuing presence of the artifacts. The widely societies that possess only memory and those that confront memory with
admired vernacular architecture of many parts of the world, as often illus
history. In an oral society, even if there is a dynamic leading to a collective
trated from the Greek islands, for example, would, until overridden by the
understanding of the past, memory resides in individuals. The absence of
radical changes of the twentieth century, accede to similar analyses that
records contributes to the modification of social memory and tradition
show a close relation of social and building programs. from generation to generation. The past is not so much separate from, as
subsumed in, the present. Studying preliterate societies, several authors
The Relation ofCollective Memoiy to Histoiy: note the insistent attention of these societies to the present moment and the
Preliterate to Literate Society distancing of the society from its past. In preliterate societies, cultural tra
dition is maintained in face-to-face communication and in the context of
What can be made of this theoretically? Considering the operation of present issues. In such an oral society,forgetting, and even forgetting that
memory in a society and its extension in time, we must distinguish between
164 / STANFORD ANDERSON
one forgets, is as important as memory. Jack Goody and Ian Watt observe
that “the social function of memory—and of forgetting—can thus he seen
as the final stage of what may be called the Iwineonatic oijanizatthn of the
cultural tradition in non-literate society?’5 Transformations of social prac
tices or forms may or may not be noted at the time of the event, but are un
likely to remain tn memory in the face of the perceived reinstatement of bal
ance. Similarl Jacques lie Goff observes that collective memory functions
in oral societies according to what he calls a “generative reconstruction”
that eliminates or transforms those parts of the tradition that are no longer
operative.6
Under these conditions, social and disciplinary memories, only so rec
ognized by an outsider, would both participate in this homeostatic process
that constantly reestablishes the balance while also forgetting its difference
from the past. The relation of these memories to one another may appear
seamless. The making of the physical environment is at one with the social
construction of the society; perhaps the builder is honored for demonstra
ble skills, but so too are others who are part of this attainment of balance
through both maintenance and change. The generative reconstruction,
aimed at maintaining a stable present, subsumes distinctions that only the
external observer would perceive.
“Literate societies, on the other hand’ write Goody and Van, “cannot
discard, absorb, or transmute the past in the same wax’. Instead, their mern
ben are faced with permanently recorded versions of the past and its
beliefs; and because the past is thus set apart from the present historical
inquiry becomes possible. This in turn encourages skepticism; and skept
icism, not only about the legendary past, but about received ideas about the
universe as a whole. From here the next step is to see how to build up and
to test alternative explanations; and out of this there arose the kind of logi
cal, specialized, and cumulative intellectual tradition of sixth-century lo
nia”7—and, of course, the intellectual traditions of our own day, both in the
West and in other parts of the world. These are the preconditions for self-
conscious forms of memory and for divergences of memory systems within
a single culture. They are also the preconditions for memorialization; that
is, assigning to built form the explicit role of maintaining memory.
The Vernacuirn; Mcmo and Architecture / 165
Variations ofMenzo;y in Literate Societies
Consider now the variations and changes of memory in literate soci
eties—still with attention to the production or reception of vernacular ar
chitecture. Goody and Wart are explicit that the nature of new historical so
cieties varies with the form of language. Significant variations extend to our
own day, perhaps in the relation of language and histors’, certainly in the so
cietal apparatus constructed to facilitate or inhibit the writing of history and
its concomitant critical role. Today, even among highly literate societies,
there are still those that are relatively ahistorica]. The distribution through
out the world of the concept of an archive—let alone of archives and muse
ums themselves—is uneven. Preliterate societies, and also literate societies
that have not given a prominent place to historical studies, differ greatly
from the highly historicized societies of the West (and perhaps elsewhere)
in respect to knowledge of the past and the relation of that knowledge to
the present.8
One might remark that this differentiation is not only to be recognized
by country or language area, but also by disciplines. Architecture has not
been the most laggard of disciplines in the studied examination of its past.
Yet the marketing of architecturaL drawings and the burgeoning of at
chitectural archives and museums over the past two decades speaks to a
significant change in the relation of history and artifacts, also in the \\est.°
So-called vernacular architecture may be interestingly correlated with dis
tinctions among societies as preliterate or literate within varying linguistic
and memory systems—historic societies. that is. with varying levels or types
of historic consciousness.
Sustained Vernacular Traditions JVithin Historical Societies
The Dutch examples cited above can he set into such a continuum of
change within a vernacular tradition. Though perhaps not quite as strongly,
much the same can be observed in English villages. In England, there is a
stronger tradition of the free-standing house, a type that invites a turn in
the argument, another route to modernism, conceived of by a figure al
ready introduced in this volume—the German architect Hermann Muthe
sius. Muthesius served from 1896 tO t903 as the “technical attaché” at the
German embassy in London and was an assiduous student of the English
architectural achievements of the late nineteenth century, especially in do-
rOó /STANFORD ANDERSON
F The Ve;wacu1a Mnnoy, and Architecture / 167
FIG 6.5. Richard Norman Shan; housing, Bedford Park, U.K. ca. z8c).
Photo; Merrill Smith. Courtesy MIT Rotch Visual Collections.
mestic architecture, and the work of Ruskin and William Morris. He stud
ied their churches, office buildings, apartment houses, and, especially, the
English house. His three-volume work Das Engfisthe Ha us. published upon
his return to Gennanv, is still the standard for scholarship on this important
body of w-ork.
Muthesius was looking at the work of talented and developed architects,
but he saw their achievement as intimately related to the English vernacu
lar. Consider his enthusiastic and programmatic assessment of what was
termed the Queen Anne style, so notably practiced by Richard Norman
Shaw (fig. 6.s):
[The new English domestic architecture] was nothing other than a rejection of
architectural formalism in favor of a simple and natural, reasonable way of build
ing. One brought nothing new to such a movement: even’thiiig had existed for
centuries in the vernacular architecture of the small town and rural landscape
one found all that one desired and for which (mc thirsted: adaptation to needs
and local conditions, unpretentiousness and honesty of feeling; the utmost cozi
ness and comfort in the layout of rooms, color, an uncommonly attractive and
painterly (hut also reasonable) design, and an economy in building construction.
J
The new English domestic building an that developed on this basis has now pro
duced valuable results. But it has also done more; it has spread the interest in and
the understanding of domestic architecture to the entire people. It has crcated
the only sure foundation for a new artistic culture: the artistic house. And as
everyone connected with the Arts and Crafts movement in England certainly
knows, it produced that for which everyone labored: the English house.’2
[Germany can do what] once was done in England: return our vernacular build
ing art to simplicity and naturalness, as is preserved in our old rural buildings; re
nounce even’ architectural trinket on and in our house; and introduce a sense of
spatial warmth, color, natural layout, and sensible confizuration. All this rather
than continuing to be restrained b’. thc chains of formalistic and academic archi
tecture-mongering. The way in which the English achieved this goal. namely, h’
readapting vernacular and niral building motifs, promises us the richest har
vest—precisely in Germany where the rural building manner of the past rs
clothed in a poetry and a wealth of sentiment that few old English buildings can
match. If we restrict ourselves to the homegrown, and if each of us impartially
follows his own individual artistic inclinations, then we shall soon have not only
a reasonable hut also a national, vernacular building art. Nationality in art need
nor be artificially bred. If one raises genuine people, we shall have a genuine art
that for even individual with a sincere character can be nothing other than na
tional. For ever’.’ genuine person is a part of a genuine nationality.’3
Muthesius’s program has its roots in an aspiration for conventions shared
by the entire society, and it is thus at base a social advocac Precisely for
these reasons, he places the domestic interior and the house above all else in
defining a new movement in architecture.’4 Muthesius sought to establish
an indigenous German form of the new type of vernacular domestic archi
tecture that was already well developed in England, but he wavered be
tween the opportunities and difficulties of doing so. To the extent that this
cultural work might depend on models in the vernacular of town and coun
tnc he considered Germany to have more and better models. Yet in Ger
many there was no culture of the house to compare with that of England.
He lamented that Germans now characteristically lived in and moved
among rental apartments. Consequently, they felt little or no concern for
their surroundings, or that their dwellings be artistically designed. None
theless, Muthesius argued that “a change in our German artistic situation
can only take its start in the German house, which essentially is vet to be
created?”5
Muthesius sought authenticity for architecture, both for its own in
tegrity and as that which could win the common assent necessary for a gen
eral cultural advance. His book Stilarchitektur und Baukunst (1902), bears an
epigram from William Morris: “Indeed, I have a hope that it will be from
such necessary, unpretentious buildings that the new and genuine architec
r
168/STANFORD ANDERSON
rure will spring, rather than from our experiments in conscious style more
or less ambitious, or those for which the immortal Dickens has given us the
never-to-he-forgotten adjective ‘Architectoorajooral.’” The proper models
for a new and genuine architecture could only be “necessary, unpretentious
huildingsTm Such were the simple, sathlirb burghers’ houses of around
iSoc, “which could still be a model for our contemporary conditions?’17
Such also was the vernacular building art of town and country in a time and
place where the nonmonumental was properly distinguished from the
monumental.
In this advocacy, we may recognize, first, an appreciation for a received
vernacular presumed to have the qualities of holding the environment and
life itself in a harmonious relationship. If such a oneness was a thing of the
past. or at least was slipping away, there was still the will to restore it. That
restoration, it was argued, could only he effected by grasping closely what
remained of the most recent presence of such a harmonious condition.
There is a romance in this program. We also know that it can lead to a
cultural conservatism. With Muthesius and many others of this persuasion,
this was a highly nationalist enterprise. For all the valued lessons of En
gland, Germany would have to find its own way. The task was precisely to
distinguish the German way of life from that of France. In the following
decades and in other hands, such programs turned racist. However. I think
none of these attributes—romanticism, consen-atism, nationalism, or
racism—cling necessarily to this enterprise. Consider again the Dutch ex
amples introduced at the outset of this chapter. It is plausible to think that
Granpré Moliere was more successful in Muthesius’s enterprise than
Muthesius himself. Building for the higher levels of the industrializing Ger
man metropolis, Muthesius’s work was notably marked by privilege and an
glophilia. Granpre Moliere’s precedent was distinctly Dutch and, as hous
ing, directly in the service of a collective. In accord with Dutch views
during his lifetime, we can concede that his is a conservative path and
marked by a national character. Yet, as already suggested, his work seems to
deserve a more generous interpretation. Vreewijk is a notable exercise in
city building, extended both in space and in time.
For all that the modernists saw themselves in contradistinction to
Granpré Moliere, much of their own housing work can be seen as a mod
ernist extension of this same city-building tradition. The two Rotterdam ex
amples introduced above and Oud’s work at Kiefhoek maintain many of the
traits of Dutch row houses—modest size, main dwelling area at street level
and little removed from it, large windows that allow a view into, and often
The Vernacular, Memoiy, attd Architecture / t69
through, the house. Oud and Stain’s dwellings at the WeiEenhofsiedlung
are still row houses, seemingly because of this same city-building commit
ment. However, with an increasing commitment to international mod
ernism, the interiors are innovative and more individualistic. Oud’s
1\eifsenhof row houses, for example. turn the relatively closed private areas
of the house to the street and open the living spaces to a garden at the rear.
As in these examples, there is, then, a range of degrees of “vernacular us
age” within highly literate and historical societies that extends from the rel
atively unselfconscious maintenance of housing and urban forms, through
deliberate adaptations of the received vernacular types, to the adaptation of
elements across time and space in explorations made possible by what I
shall call the quasi-autonomy of architecnn-al form. Even in highly literate
and historical societies such as the Netherlands, there are traditions of
dwelling wpe, of urban fabric, and even of architectural abstraction that
represent interesting, often contributive. persistences of earlier sociocuiwral
organization. Here I used the word “tradition?’ Within historic societies, I
think it is tradition that continues to serve in the maintenance of a dynamic
equilibrium in society. Increasingly, this will be “invented tradition’it yet
there are those conventions or traditions that form the substrate of any so
ciety—so pervasive that they are rarely brought to cognizance.
The historical concept of “mentalities” is particularly useful for under
...is also a
standing phenomena such as these. “The history of mentalities
meeting point for opposing forces which are being brought into contact by
the dynamics of contemporary historical research: the individual and the
collective, the long-term and the even’day, the unconscious and the inten
tional, the stmctural and the conjectural, the marginal and the general:’
Jacques Le Goff observes)9 This is an excellent catalogue of the concerns
that must be represented in a study of traditional building practices (or
what may be called “the vernacular”) m historical societies.
A further step in the deployment of the vernacular in modern culture can
be taken by emphasizing three points of this paper: first, vernacular archi
tecture is often seen as an exemplar of a societal condition of wholeness;
second, vernacular architecture can (should) sen’e as a source for contem
porary production that is judged particularly for its social contribution; and
third, this enterprise is not only to be observed in architecture that is di
rectly derivative from earlier examples. Reliance on what may, in fact, be
learned from the vernacular appears, and appears most convincingly, in
some of our most innovative architects. Consider Franceso Passanti’s co
gent essay in this volume on Le Corbusier. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the
 yr
170/STANFORD ANDERSON
young Le Corbuster, was trained in a regionalisr Swiss art school. As a
young man, in 1911, he made his now famous”voyage d’Orienr?’20Through
the Balkans and Turkey, but also in his continued travels in the Mediter
ranean, Jeanneret paid close attention to the vernacular production of these
regions. According to Passanri. Jeamteret sought the sites of a pure and nat
ural man but also on this trip realized that these sites were even more vial
nerable to change and loss than the environments of his own western Eu
ropean homeland. Solutions to the issues of modern change were not to be
found directly in the vernacular, not even in the vernacular of places as vet
less affected by modern change. Passanti observes that Jeanneret’s note
books from these travels record little of the architecture he encountered,
Rather, he is impressed with the people and their relations to their artifacts.
It was the attraction to such relations rather than the vernacular forms
themselves that affected Le Corbusier’s modernism. The account of the
Banni given above and Le Corbusier’s post—World War II fascination with
vernacular architecture accord with this conviction about the closeness of
people and their artifacts in these societal conditions.21 In his own modern
and Western setting, Le Corbusier sought the “found elements” of everyday
life, not those conceived for aesthetic purposes. As in those times and places
recognized to possess a vernacular tradition, this was a search for “forms
not chosen hut received?’
‘We ma’ recall, through Muthesius and others, the search for objects and
environments perceived to besachlich—facrual, to the point, or pertinent—
in their nature. Adolf Loos can be argued to have elevated this search both
theoretically and in his architecrural work.22 He resisted formulaic mod
ernisms precisely because he thought the modern vernacular surrounded
him in modernizing cities such as his own Vienna. Muthesius. Laos, Oud.
Le Corbusier. and others, each in his own wax’. held our the hope for a
modem culture that would be as integral between life and form as the x’er
nacular was conceived to be. With each step in this sequence of modern ar
chitects, we also rake another step in the commitment of this integrated
modern architecture, not to a direct assimilation of earlier forms, however
admirable in their own right, but rather to a profound exploration of the
conditions of its own modernity. In the work of Oud, there was still a tie to
such sachlich matters as sound city building and, within the dwelling unit, a
dominant attention to such generic issues as privacy, even as he radically al
tered that organization. With Le Corbusier, such issues might also be ad
dressed, but the enterprise was lifted to a more abstract plane—one is as
much confronted with the metaphoric account of our condition as with the
altered condition itself.
The T/ernacuIai Memøy, and Architecture I in
Jf a significant relation of Le Corbusier to the vernacular can be estab
lished. and this in his most abstract works. it is no surprise that the same re
lation is found in the work of other notable modernists. “It is important to
have established that [Alvarl, Aalto’s work was based on his own translation
and development of vernacular inspiration, his ‘natural variability of therne
rather than a direct copy of a vernacular model:’ Sarah Menin observes, for
example.23 Subtle readings of Le Corbusier have long since protected his
work from the reductionism of his own famous dictum: “A house is a ma
chine to live in?’ This subtlety also delivered him into the higher realms of
abstraction and metaphor. One cannot deny Aalto his place in these realms,
but one also distinguishes in his work the return to a more visceral relation
of person and artifact, a more literal sense of relation to the vernacular.
Aalto was not alone in this; Cohn St. John Wilson built his critical career on
this division within modern architecmre. Aalto is particularly honored in
Wilson’s book The Other Tradition ofModei-n Architecture, but its subtitle is
The Uncompleted Project.24 Indeed, there are many well-received architects
today who can be perceived as contributors to that project, among them
Dimitris Antonakakis, Marion Blackwell, WiU Brnder, David Chipperfield,
Sverre Fehn, Rick Joy, Ricardo Legoretta, Donhyn Lyndon, the late SamueL
Mockbee, GLenn Murcutt, John and Patricia Patkau, Antoine Predock,
Maurice Smith, and Lawrence Speck, to name only a few, of diverse orien
tation and some geographic distribution. That this “other tradition” finds
value in the directly felt association of person and artifact does not dimin
ish either the fact, or the intellectual and aesthetic demands, of the morc re
mote appreciation of the vernacular in the work of a Le Corbusier or of our
contemporaries who stand in that tradition.
Like Muthesius and others. Le Corbusier and Aalto saw the vernacular
as a conceptual model for a natural relationship between society and its ar
tifacts. While these architects, in their architectural work, each in his or her
own way, could separate this enterprise from formal borrowings, the un
derlying ethos is the one that has been shared by many architects of varying
persuasions—namely, again, that in the vernacular there is a namral rela
tionship between society and its artifacts. Conversely, I think this perceived
relationship is the way in which we have long recognized the traits by
which we identify “the vernacular?’
24-6 / Notes to Pages 152—54
of most of these authors in an article written without much conviction for a popu
lar audience in the summer of 19t3: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, “La Maison suisse’
Les Etrennes helvItiqut-s, 1914: 33—39.
Behrens’s classicism was itself pai-t of the same sathlich interest in modern
vernacular, because it “-as specifically inspired by German architecture around t8co.
when the German bourgeoisie first attained a high level of self-consciousness.
German critics contemporary with Behrens. like Alfred Lichtwark, Paul Schultze
Naumburg, Karl Schemer. and Paul Mebes, saw classicism around i8oo (urn Moo) as
a sort of bourgeois vernacular. But little in Le Corbusier’s letters -suggests that he
understood this implication of Bebrens’s style while he was working for hint: his
attention was focused on learning the formal discipline of classicism, an architec
natal language very different from that of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic in which he
had been educated. On the remrn to classicism in early twentieth-cenrnrv Germany,
see Stanford Anderson, “The Legacy of German Neo-Classicism and Biedermeier:
Behrens, Tessenow, Loos and Mies’Assemblage 15 (October ‘99’): 62—87.
.6. “Voilà l’énorme lampe de sacrifice qui s’allume. Et combien il est dur de
vivre chaque heure en sacrifiant!” La Corhusier to Francis Jourdain, December zi,
1913, in La Corhusiers copybook. Bihliothèque de Ia ‘ille, La Chaux-de-Fonds.
LCms89.
4-’. La Corbusier, Vepy ant ardjitecrnre, 16. 48—63. 161—82: the famous definition
reads, in full: “L’atchitecture est le jeu savant, correct et magnifiquc des volumes as
semblés sous Ia lumière?’ La Corbusier came back to the theme of proportions later
in his life, with his book LeModulor: Essai cur ant mesure harinonique a l’ichelle ha-
maine applicable universelleinent a t’arthitecture (Paris, 1942).
48. On La Corbusier’s slcyscrapers, see Francesco Passanti, “The Skyscrapers of
the Vile Contemporaine’Acsemblage 4 (October 1987): 53—65. On the proportions
of the Villa Stein, see Roger Hertz-Fischler, “La Corbusier’s ‘Regulating Lines’ for
the Villa at Garches (1927) and Other Early Works’JSAIJ .4.3 (March ‘984): 53—59.
49. For a recent discussion of La Corbusier’s sources, see my essay ‘Architec
ture: Proportion, Classicism and Other Issues’ in Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier,
ed. Sranislaus von Moos and Arthur Ruegg (New Haven, 2002), 68—97, tSP. 77—81
and 83—86.
so. Pierre Reverdy. “L’Emotion,” Nord-Sud 8 (October 1917), and “L’Image,”
Nord-Sud 13 (March 1918). Both essays are reprinted in his Oeurres completes: Nord
Sad, SeLfdefence et aim-es écrirssur l’an et lapoisie (Ig1.’—I926 (Paris, 195). 52—60 and
73—75. In the first essay. Re”erdy argues that a work of art is consn-ucted through el
ements taken from life. In the second, lie argues that the poetic image is born “from
the bringing together of two more or less remote realities” (“du rapprochement de
deux réalités plus ou moms éloignées”). Christopher Green has already pointed out
the importance of Reverdy for the painting of Juan Gris in the late 19105, and for
that of La Corbusier in the late t93os: Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies
(New Haven, 1987), passim; Christopher Green, “The Architect as Artist:’ in Arts
Council of Great Britain, exhibition catalogue, ed. Michael Raeburn and Victoria
Wilson, Le Corbusic;;Architect ofthe Cent-un- (London, 1987), 117.
51. “La podste n’est que dans le verbe. Plus forte est Ia poésie des faits. Des ob
Notes to Pages rj—6 / 24-7
jets qui signifient quelque chose et qui sont disposes avec tact et talent crCent un fait
poétique?’ La Corbusier, Vers une architecture, ji;, In the chapter tided “Des yeux qui
ne voient pas - . .
III: Las Autos” (see n. 32 above).
52. Man Caroline McLaod. “Urbanism and Utopia: La Corhus-ier from Re
gional Svndicalism to Vich-” (Ph.D. diss.. Princeton Universth’, 1985).
s3. Stanford Anderson has addressed the question of continuity and change in
architecture using a conceptual model derived from Karl Popper’s theory of scien
tific knowledge. See. e.g., Stanfurd Anderson. iArchitecture and Tradition?’ Archi
ustuml Association journal 8o (May 1965): “Types and Convenrions In Time: To
wards a History for the Duration and Change of Artifacts:’ Perspecta iS (1982):
108—17, 2c6—7, and Chapter 6 in this volume.
6. Anderson: The Vernacular Memoy, and Architecture
‘. This strategy can be observed in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition and
publication of Bernard Rudofsky’sArchitecture WirhoutArchitects (New York, 1964).
2. Nancy Stieher, “The Professionalization of Housing Design: A Study of Col
lectivism and Cultural Pluralism in Amsterdam” (Ph.D. diss.. \Iassachusetts Insti
nate ofTechnologv, t986). and Id., Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam: Ream
figuthq Urban Order and Identity. 1900—192o (Chicago, 1998).
Cf. also Stanford Anderson, “Memon- Without Monuments: VernacularAr
chitecture?’ Traditiorn-il Dwellinqs and Settk’nzents Rn*n’ ii, i (Fail 1999): 12—22.
. Stanford Anderson, “Memon- in Architecture / Erinnening in der Architek
mr’Daidalos (Berlin) 8 (December 1995): 22—’.
5. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy:’ in Literacy in Tra
ditional Societies, ed. Goody (Cambridge, 1968), 30, 67.
6. Jacques La Gofl History and Memoy [Storia e memoria (Turin, 1977)], trans.
Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York, 1992), s. See also André Leroi
Gourhan, “Las Voies de l’histoire avant l’Ccrimre,’ in Faire tie I’histoire, ed. La Goff
and Pierre Nora (Paris, 1974). 1: 93—105.
. Goody and Watt. “Consequences of Literan’’ 67—68.
8. In accounting fbr the “conquest and eradication of memory by histon’
Pierre Not-a seems tome to glorify the conditions of “so-cafled primitive or archaic
societies:’ and to show too little appreciation tbr the critical dimension of history in
modem societies. See his “Between Memory and Historv’ .RI.?lrsrntations 26
(Spring 1989): 726.
9. Aysen Savas, “Between Document and Monument: Architectural Artefacts in
the Age of Specialized Institutions” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, Mass., MIT rn4-).
io. This section draws on Hermann Muthesius, Stilarchitektur und Baukunst:
Wandlungen tier Architektur irn NIX Jahrhundert and ihr heutiger Standpunkt (Mül
heim-Ruhr, 1902), trans., with an introduction, by Stanford Anderson as Style-Ar
chitecture and Building-An: 7i-ansfonnations ofArthitecture in the Nineteenth Centuiy
and Its Present &ndition (Santa Monica, Calif, 1994). On Muthesius, see Chapter
in this volume and, with particular relation to his concern with domestic architec
—
rure, Laurent Sta[der, “Vie man em Haus haut: Hermann Muthesius (1861—1927)
 24.8 / Motes to Pages 166—72
Das Landhaus als kulturgeschiehtlicher Entwmf’ (Ph.D. diss., ETH, Zurich, 2002).
ii. Hermann Muthesius, Das rzwlisthr Hans: Eniwicklung, Bedingungen,Anlage,
Aujbau, Ernrichtung mid Innenramnn, vols. (Ber]in, 1904—5).
12. Muthesius, S1,’le-Arr/,itecture and Buildinq-An, trans. Anderson, 96—97.
13. Ibid., 9’; trans. slightly modified.
[4. In the Introduction to this volume, the editors note the ewmologieal tie of
the word “vernacular” to the domestic realm.
is. Muthesius. St’.’k-Anhirecture and Building-An. trans. Anderson, Sc.
ró. William Morris. ‘An Address Delivered at the Distribution of Prizes to Stu
dents of the Birnlingharu Municipal School of Art” (nd..) The word “architec
tooralooral’ is quoted from ch. a— of Dickens’s Great Eectadans: ‘“Vhv, yes. Sir
said Joe. me and Wopsle venr off straight to look at the Blacking Ware’s. But we
didn’t find that it come up to its likeness in the red bills at the shop doors; which I
mcantersav added Joe. in an explanatory manner, ‘as it is there drawd too architec
tooralooral
17. Muthesius. Svde-Architecture and Building-An. trans. Anderson. s;.
[8. See, e.g.. The Invention of Tradition. ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
(Cambridge. ‘983).
[9. Jacques Le Goff, “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities.” in Constructing the
Past: Essays In Historical Methoda logy, ed. id. and Pierre Nota (Cambridge, 1985),
ióo—So; Fain de- I’histoire, ed. Is Goff and Nora, : “6—94.
zo. Is Corbu.cicr, Le Vàyaqe dOrient (Paris, i966). ed. and trans. “-an Zaknic as
Journey to the East (Cambridge, Mass.. 1987).
21. Rudofsk-y,Anhiterture (VithoutArchitects.
22. Stanford Anderson. “Sachlichkcit and Modernity, or Realist Architecmre,’ in
Otto Wà.qner: Reflections on the Raiment ofModern it-v. ed. Ham- Mafigrave (Santa
Monica, Calif.. 1993), 322—60.
21. Sarah Menin. “Fragments from the Forest: Aalto’s Requisdoning of Forest
Place and MarrerTJoun,al of’Architecture 6 (Autumn 200i): r’9—30;.
24. Cohn St. John Wilson. The Othcr Tradition ofModern Architecture: The Un
completed Project London. 1995).
7. plith The Vernacular in Place and Time
i. Mv point of reference here is, of course, John BrinckerhoffJackson, “A Sense
of Place, a Sense of Time;’ in id., A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven,
1994), [54—63. The following essay is set against Jackson’s understanding of the ver
nacLilar, which he developed with regard to the landscapes and cityscapes of the
United States. The lucidin’ of his descriptions and the sensitivity to history exhib
ited by Jackson always seems informed by a will to discover the peculiarly American.
The willingness limits the necessary critique of what is ordinary and common in the
“American” landscape. In reflecting on the East, one might return to a critique of
the “West” or, more particularly, of the ordinary and common in a capitalist econ
omy’s shaping of the built environment.
2. The comparison between East and West is largely implicit in this chapter.
3. The East-West sunilarities in the claim of a break with the pastor the bent to-
A
Notes to Pages 174—78 / 24-9
ward a utopian and all-encompassing design, the degree of politicization, and the
periodization of the modern (nineteenth cenrun, interwar period, and communist
era) are worth analyzing in a comparative manner. Differences in the pattern of in
dustrialization (generally later in the East), the restrictions on the “artistic” creativ
its’ of the architect, and the role of internationalization are all research desiderata.
...
Indeed, this utopian aspect becomes a salient point of comparison and one
that might suggest restrictions on the modernist paradigm in architecture in the re
spective political systems.
.
This is especially true in the former GDR. “-here demolition has begun in
Hoverswerda and in parts of the former East Berlin.
a. In cities such as Uviv and Riga, the modern has a different valence and char
acter beflire World War I. in the intenvar period, and after World \Vär II. The late
modernism of the Soviet Union “-as preceded by the monumental historicism of
Stalinism, s’-hich succeeded the projections of a revolutionary modernism in the
earls- Soviet period. In Poland after World War II. the reconstruction of historic city
centers in what might be termed a postmodernist fashion (modern materials, mod-
cm configuration of interiors and space behind historicist façades) took place con
comitant with the prevalence of a more typical socialist modernism.
.
In over stirs inten-ie’-s with residents of the region in 1999, 2000, and 200i,
many of whom lived in socialist housing, not once did my questioning about their
“hometown’ elicit any reference to the to’vers of reinforced concrete on the pe
ripheries of Gdansk. L’viv, Riga. orVilnius.
8. This is not to say that there “crc no local distinctions in Soviet architecture.
but these “-crc severely delimited by the mass production of prefabricated con
struction elements and the limited freedom allowed the architect. Focusing on
Lithuania In his manuscript “East Bloc. Vest Vie’y. Architecture and Lithuanian
National Identity.” John Maciuika, assistant professor of architecture at the Univer
sin’ of’s’irginia. makes a strong case for recognizing parterns of variation in struc
tural rhythms and e’-en Western influences in the Soviet system of htnlding. Cer
tainly, the truly distinctive modern buildings in cities such as Vilnius. Tallinn, or
Riga that date from the late So\-iet period are exceptions. Ho”- they respnnd to the
international modernism in architecture as it developed in the W’est is beyond the
scope of this chapter.
9. John BrinkerhoffJackson, Discovethw the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven,
[984), xii: “The beauty that ‘ye see in the vernacular landscape is rhe image of otir
common humanity: hard work, stubborn hope, and mutual forbearance striving to
be love.” Because Jackson’s writings remain a touchstone in discussion of the mean
ing of the “vernacular” in the United States, one cannot but cite him in this context.
in. One could just as weLl look at the “vernacular landscape” of malls and gas
stations Jackson loved to describe and call it an image of humanity molded by the
market.
ii. See Robert Riley, “Vernacular Landscapes;’ in Advances in Environment, Be
havior and Desgn, ed. Ervin H. Zube and Gary T. Moore (New York, 130).
[2. One might expand this to include the interiors of apartment buildings and
residences built before the Soviet period that were transformed into communal
apartments and “redesigned” by their occupants.
192 / JOHN CZAPLICKA
In identffi-ing the vernacular of a region or a city, it seems advisable al
ways to consider constellations of elements that lend a landscape or
cityscape character or personality. The ensemble, configuration. and rela
tionship of the builr elements to a type of landscape—that is, combinations
of elements seen together in a larger gestalt—generate a sense of place that
transcends an’ single piece of architecture or single style. Given the cross
currents of culmre that configure the complex fabric of cities, different
epochal styles and forms are common to different places, and in their com
bination, they lend diem distinction. It is through the combined qualities
of the commonplace and distinctive that one can understand how a vernac
ular modernism could be conceived in a region where a version of mod
ernism has generally been the vehicle and expression of placeless political
abstraction. It would be a tragedy if the post-Soviet, postcommunist cities,
with their new powers of self determination, were now to fall prey to the
placelessness of an ideologically driven architecture from the West or to
nostalgic yearnings to reconstruct the lost past. Perhaps the new regional
ism in Europe and the realization of belonging to Europe itself will allow
the residents of these cities to configure their hometowns in a way that is
true to their time and their place.
IA
EPILOGUE
Critical Regionalism Revisited: Reflections on
the Mediatory Potential of Built Form
KENNETH FRAMPTON
Critical regionalism would appear to be one of those formulations that has
enjoyed a surprising longevity. Frederic Jameson makes this abundantly
clear at the end of his book The Seeds ofTime (1994) where he enters into a
sensitive critique of the concept as the ftilcrum of a potentially resistant cul
rnre. There are a number of passages in Jameson’s appraisal when he is able
to synthesize aspects of this hypothesis in a particularly revealing way. A sin
gle example will perhaps suffice, It occurs in that passage where, following
my lead, he compares Tadao Aido’s “self-enclosed modernity” to Jørn Ut-
ion’s Bagsvaerd Church, wherein the two architects are seen as adaptmg the
same universal technology of reinforced concrete to totally different cul
tural ends. Thus where Utzon uses monolithic frame-and-shell construction
to make a subtle synthesis between an oriental pagoda and a Nordic stave
church, Ando casrs his concrete into a top-lit prism constructed of load-
bearing walls in order to engender a revitalized Japanese feeling for the in
terplav of light, material, and detail. Jameson points out how both exam
ples “hold out the possibility of inventing some new relationship to the
technological beyond nostalgic repudiation or mindless corporate celebra
tion. If Critical Regionalism is to have any genuine content it will do so
only on the strength of such invention and its capacity to ‘enclose’ or to re
open and transfigure the burden of the modern?’
The prospect of transfiguring the modern transcends all those critical
categories oscillating between the modern, the posrmodern, and the anti-
modem to leave us disarmed, as it were, before the relentless technoscicn
tific modernization of our age. This being so, one is hard pressed to know
how to situate oneself befhre the prospect of a vernacular modernism, par-
 V
194 / KENNETH FRAMPTON
ticularly when the term comes to be applied across a fairly wide range of so
cioanthropological—cum—art historical phenomena. Given that the Latin
terms verna and modernus both have their origins in the antique world some
five centuries before Christ, one becomes even more perplexed by the
provocative conjunction of these terms. While one may refer, as the editors
of this volume certainly do, to the widespread integration of agrarian build
ing methods and materials into the unfolding trajectory of the modern
movement, going back certainly to William Morris’s Red House of 1859 or
even further, by another century to Marie Antoinette’s Hameau, discreetly
located as a rustic folly in the grounds of Versailles, one nonetheless remains
aware that, with the dissolution of agrarian building culture, the pre-aes
thetic innocence of the vernacular, which could still be evoked by Adolf
Loos in 1910, now no longer presents itself as an option that is readily avail
able.
One assumes that this is the polemical point of the term, namely, that the
vernacular cannot even be addressed today without subsuming it under the
aesthetic strategy of modernism. At the same time, instrumental reason con
tinues to impose its machinations upon the world with no regard for the in
tervening traces of a mediatory culture. However, it should be noted in this
respect that within the scope of the rationalized technology that is currently
at our disposal, the process of building remains stubbornly anachronistic in
character, above all because, notwithstanding the constant invention of new
light-weight materials, possessed of unprecedented advantageous proper
ties, along with the development of an ever more sophisticated range of
electro-mechanical services, the insertion of a building into its site remains
as archaic as ever it was. It is surely this, plus the persistence of proprietal
rights, that enables building to resist its frill commodification.
It may be argued that a critically resistant architecture is one that is to
tally opposed to rendering a building as a free-standing aesthetic object;
one that is akin to sculpture in terms of its figurative rhetoric. In light of
this, one remains convinced that the general environmental predicament in
duced by the rapacity of “motopian” development can only be offset by ac
cording a priority to “landscape” both as a metaphor and as a literal device
for the ongoing modulation of the existing urbanized environment. It
should be self-evident by now that the megalopolis in all its vicarious forms
is on the verge of occupying the habitable surface of the entire earth. Thus
the cittá e4ffusa is potentially everywhere, and while there are no doubt
some vestiges left of preindustrial agrarian topography, we also know that
as far as maximized economic development is concerned, nothing is sacro
Epilogue: Critical Regionalism Revisited / 195
sanct. It is symptomatic in this regard that the self-defeating, destructive
pathos of mass tourism finds its corollary in the Disneyfication of the his
toric urban core. While building in the midst of a traditional urban context
is largely a matter of sustaining the grain of the existing fabric, building on
“Greenfield” sites inevitably runs the risk of adding one more arbitrary ob
ject to the endless proliferation of such objects. Against this regard there re
mains the critical possibility of extending the earthwork of a building (i.e.,
the foundations) in such a way that the structure becomes integrated into
the landscape and vice versa.
Roofivork and Earthwork
In many so-called primitive building cultures, the roofwork and the
earthwork are brought together in such an intimate way as to eliminate the
need for any kind of vertical enclosure. At the same time as far as our re
ceived notions of the vernacular are concerned, it is obvious that the roof
has to be pitched, if traditional cultural conventions are to be respected.
This norm prevails as a sign of “dwelling” in the ubiquitous suburbia that
constitutes the residential fabric of the average megalopolis. One hardly
needs to add that the modernist flat roof was always a violation of this tra
ditional iconography. We need only to recall the Aryan roof of the Heimat
stil in the Third Reich to understand the ffill measure of this time-honored
prejudice. It is surely significant, in this regard, that a regionally oriented
modern architecture has often entailed making a particularly noticeable play
with the form of the roof, as we find this say in the late 194-05 and early
19505 in the work of such architects as Jørn Utzon, Alvar Aalto, Hans
Scharoun, and even Le Corbusier, not to mention more recent organic
works designed by John and Patricia Patkau of Vancouver, or let us say the
corrugated, metal “outback” roofs that would grace the domestic work of
the Australian architect Glenn Murcutt in the 19705. Clearly, the oversailing
roof has certain advantages from the point of view of sustainability. I am al
luding to its innate capacity to provide shade, to protect walls and above all
of course to dispose of rainfall and snow. In any event in the pre-industrial
vernacular, the roof, whether flat or pitched, was always apparently a direct
consequence of the climate in which the building happened to be situated.
Thus along with the influence of local craft methods invariably bestowed
upon the work its specific “placelike” character.
One may argue that in tectonic terms both the roofivork and the earth
work are crucial factors from the point of view of engendering sectional
 196 / KENNETH FRAMPTON
profiles and topographic boundaries that are capable of standing against the
space-endlessness of the “value-free;’ megalopolitan domain. It would be
demagogic, however, to conclude from this that flat roofs have no possible
critical cultural capacit\c
Maner and Wand
The German words Matter and TV/md, which may. I believe, be used au
but interchangeably in translating the English “wall;’ clearly allude to two
tectonicallv opposite methods for the enclosure of space, and in this oppo
sition, there surely resides a potentially infinite range of expression as far as
spatial enclosure is concerned. Where the one assumes those opaque,
heavnveight, load-bearing characteristics that we necessarily associate with
the earthwork, the other has a relatively lightweight, screenlilce character,
possibly even translucent or transparent, one that may be readily affiliated
with a load-bearing structural frame and with the rooftvork that such a
frame invariably supports. It should be self-evident that this already pre
sents a kind of irreducible tectonic articularion that maybe orchestrated in
countless ways so as to express distinctly different and highly layered cui
rural connotations, as a kind of infinite poetic potential arising out of tradi
tion, including by now the all but infinite tradition of the “new;’ which is
perhaps one of the most inescapably postmodern effects of our time. This
tectonicpoiëszs, as it were, should in no way be at variance with the project
of cultivating a sustainable building culture that in its flail potential would
by definition be resistant to the global nemesis of environmental pollution.
Here, of course, many time-honored factors come back into play: the old
constraints of landfall, wind, watershed, and the trajectory of the sun. Be
yond these constant limitations arising out of the site, there lies an all but
infinite range of relative permeability, irrespective of the basic tectonic char
acter of the wall. I am alluding of course to the way in which fenestration
may be positioned, inflected, shaded, and soon, irrespective of whether the
openings are pierced or made an integral part of a lightweight membrane.
Center and Penpberv
As far as architecture is concerned, the limitations of the mediaton- stem
perhaps from the experiential “distancing” that necessarily accompanies its
representation in terms of photography and film. The camera unavoidably
reduces architecture to the perspectival image, that is to say to an exclu
I
Ii
Epilogue: Critical Ergionalism Revisited / i9’
sively visual phenomenon that is by definition removed from our eve’day
tactile-cum-spatial experience of built form. However, we also need to ac
knowledge a certain measure of mediatory ambivalence owing to the uni
versal proliferation and distribution of images, for while the medtatorv fa
cilitates consumetist fashion and stimulates desire, it has, at the same time.
been beneficial in its capacity to disscmmate information in such a way as to
overcome the long-standing schism between center and periphen’—be
tween the dominance of the one and the subsenience of the other. This is
particularly evident in contemporary architecture, where some of the most
sophisticated work realized today is being produced in countries that are
variously distanced from the traditional centers of cultural power and influ
ence—in countries such as Japan. Australia. India, Finland, Spain, Portugal,
Nonvav, Ireland, and in many different regions of the South American con
tinent. It is ironic that the very system that pushes the cult of the “star” ar
chitect should also provide for its antithesis; that is to say, for the genera
tion of quality work all over the world. so much so that one of the
paradoxes of critical regionalism as a cultural hypothesis is that it tends to
ward the spontaneous cultivation of a kind of hybrid “world culture” con
tinually open to further enrichment and development.
At the samc time, it is necessary to recognize the limits of architecture as
a métier; above all perhaps the fact that however much advanced techno
scientific methods may be employed in its realization, it is no more an ap
plied science than it is a form of fine art. Despite the ubiquitous triumph of
technological modernization, the practice of architecture is still to be more
properly regarded as a craft, one that, at its full range, is dedicated to the
significant mediation of the environment. In this respect, it is always as
much an ontological presence and an embodiment of societal value in spa
tial terms, as it is an abstract or symbolic representation. Hence, it is doubt
ful whether it can ever he appropriately rendered as “fine art writ large?’
Unlike literature, music, painting, and sculpture, or even theater, photog
raphy, and film, architecture cannot legitimately aspire to any kind of cul
rural autonomy, since it is too intimately involved with the processes of
everyday life and with what Jiirgen Hahermas calls the unfinished modern
project; in a word, with what Marshall Berman has identified as the pas
toral. as opposed to the counterpastoral of the formalist neo—avant garde.
It should. in fact, he contextual in respect of the culture of the lifeworld
rather than preemptive.